But as she seems to be an Austrian we must be content with the idea that “the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape.” She wanted to be fat--an eminently Austrian thought. And from here we are led to a yet earlier period. For the words “disgusting” and “bad tone,” make it necessary, Freud informs us, to remember “how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the ... body take the place--as a substitute and as an antithesis--of the larger ones.” That is, the piano was a dream disguise for the buttocks. It now hardly seems necessary to remark that “the dreamer, owing to a peculiar set of circumstances, may create for himself the right to use anything whatever as a sexual symbol.”[73] Still less to add that, generally speaking, “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas, all sharp weapons, knives, daggers and pikes,” are masculine symbols; while “all little cases, boxes, caskets, closets and stoves” have a feminine signification; or that “stairways, stairs, ladders ... or anything analogous to them” are to be regarded as specifically erotic suggestions. And to make the system complete, whenever a symbol refuses to fit in with the desired significance, we are at liberty to regard it as “misplaced emphasis” due to distortion, and to interpret it in an opposite sense. So pain may mean pleasure, and a crowd a secret. Nor is even this enough. He goes on and invents a veritable grammar of dreams. Logical connection (in the latent content) is rendered (in the manifest content) by simultaneousness; causation is expressed by succession; “either--or” by “and--and” (you dream of both alternates as being true); similarity or agreement is pictured by the concentration of several images into a fantastic unity, etc., etc. Freud commits the common and fatal error of proving too much. He should have been warned by the fate of the late Ignatius Donnelly, once Lieutenant-Governor of Minnesota. Donnelly, having shown that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, went on to show that he also wrote Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” And having discovered that these works had all a sort of sense when read from left to right, proceeded to demonstrate (in “The Great Cryptogram”) that they had an even better sense when read more or less from right to left.